PHILADELPHIA — By the top of the ninth inning, the stadium was visibly pockmarked by absences, and people were booing Jhoan Duran's walkout show. Duran, who was just doing his job as the Philadelphia Phillies' best reliever, didn't deserve any of the boos just because manager Rob "Topper" Thomson was deploying him in only the second-highest leverage situation possible. Letting loose on the pyrotechnics while the Phillies were trailing the Dodgers 4-1 and poised to go down 0-2 in the NLDS, however, was egregiously poor organizational decision-making. There is no world in which the Philly crowd would not have booed.
Still, there was one way that the Duran entrance would be redeemed, or at least forgotten: His successful hold, in spite of a bases-empty double and a walk, could still earn the Phillies a walk-off win, or an attempt through extras. The Dodgers bullpen has been ass, and L.A. manager Dave Roberts was getting cute with it and throwing Blake Treinen out there to pitch the ninth with Joe Biden in attendance, instead of the far superior Roki Sasaki. Our own Kelsey McKinney promised that if the walk-off happened, she would buy the jersey of whoever walked it off, even if it was Max Kepler.
It got dangerously close to being Max Kepler. Leading off the half-inning, Alec Bohm heard our pleas from Section 305—Alec, clap clap, Bohm, clap clap, Alec, clap clap, please, clap clap—and somehow got on base through a not terribly hard-hit single that squeezed through the infielders. Then J.T. Realmuto doubled on a smoked line drive to left field, moving Bohm to third. That was all it took for the crowd to come back to life; it was two-thirds as full as the start of the game, and already twice as loud.
So imagine what legitimate hope sounded like when the prodigal Nick Castellanos looped his own double to left field, scoring Bohm and Realmuto to make it a one-run game. A girl sitting behind us started making out with her date. The Dodgers' challenge of the play at second failed. Roberts still had yet to put Sasaki in the game, pulling Treinen for Alex Vesia. The Phillies had the tying runner on second with no outs.
Then Bryson Stott came up to bat, bunted Castellanos into an out at third base, and all the air went out of the stadium.
Here is the argument in favor of the bunt: Thomson was applying the same strategy that can be employed with the extra-innings zombie runner, where a sac bunt and a sac fly could trade two outs for a single run. Here are the arguments against the bunt: Even in the best-case scenario, scoring Castellanos from second would only tie the game, not win it, as in the case of a zombie runner.
Bunts could be powerful tools back when pitchers were hitting and the infield shift was still in play, making it easier to bunt for a hit, but in 2025 the math on a sacrifice bunt to move a runner from second to third does not check out. And after Stott showed bunt on the first pitch of the at-bat, the Dodgers' third and first basemen were already halfway to home when he tried to bunt down the third base line on the very next pitch; Max Muncy fielded the bunt roughly two inches from the barrel of Stott's bat, pivoted, and threw Castellanos out by whole feet. You can guess with your human brain what the run expectancy matrix says about trading a runner on second with no outs for a runner on first with one out. Not good things!
Of course, there was still some hope. An injured Harrison Bader, pinch-hitting for Brandon Marsh, managed a single, yet again to left field, moving Stott along to second. Weston Wilson came on to pinch run for Bader. (If Stott had, in the worst-case scenario of a non-bunt at-bat, struck out, leaving Castellanos on second with one out, what would have happened next? We will never know.) Then Kepler beefed an opportunity to sell one more jersey by grounding into what could have been an inning-ending double play, but instead was only a force-out at second. Roberts finally sent in Sasaki, who induced a two-pitch groundout from Trea Turner to end the game. The Dodgers won, 4-3, and can end the series as soon as Wednesday night, in their own park.
Postseason baseball is tailor-made to drive people insane. Sometimes you run into the Los Angeles Dodgers with a healthy Blake Snell in the NLDS. Sometimes the right bullpen move has the wrong result. Sometimes the bats go cold, as they are bound to over the course of the season, and with just a five-game series and Yoshinobu Yamamoto yet to pitch for the Dodgers, people start subscribing to the untruth that the players somehow do not want to win, or are not trying to. It is undeniable that the top of Philadelphia's lineup is playing like shit; it is difficult to come up with a solution, or someone to trade or blame for the status quo. On the slow walk back out of the stadium—which had not, really, cleared enough to lessen foot traffic—a man in his 20s tried multiple times, unsuccessfully, to start a "Fire Topper" chant.
Well, here is a small blessing: Everyone can now get mad at something very concrete, like an awful bunt call that was awful for reasons beyond your normal bunt-related awfulness. I hope we all learned a lesson here. Never bunt!
